Orson Welles, Vol I (50 page)

The private relationship of the two men seems to have lost some of its intensity. Partly this was because they were off-Broadway rather than in Harlem – Orson’s territory, not
Jack’s. Welles no longer needed to prove himself, as a man or as a director. The screenplay of
The Cradle Will Rock
includes a curious exchange between the two:

JACK CARTER

Folks’II start thinkin’ that old rumour was true.

ORSON WELLES

What rumour? … You and me? Whoever believed that?

JACK CARTER

About me and your wife.

(Orson stares at Jack.)

JACK CARTER

He’s
so dumb he has to use both hands to find his ass.

I wish it
had
been true. But now word’s out about your Jewish pal –

ORSON WELLES

Marc and me? … or Marc and Virginia?

JACK CARTER

The combination of your choice, Bubah.

Some of the complexity of their relationship is suggested by this exchange; it must have informed their work onstage.

Critical feeling emphasised that
the play had been released to a new audience, and with it perhaps the whole corpus of Elizabethan theatre. Atkinson in his re-review of the production in the
Times
says: ‘By being sensible as well as artists, Mr Welles and Mr Houseman have gone a long way toward revolutionising the staging of Elizabethan plays.’ Robert Benchley, in his bright and breezy
New Yorker
way, seems to have hit the nail
on the head, as he often did: ‘The old Marlowe opus trimmed for modern times – you would be surprised what a good show it makes. It seems like one of the best general entertainments in town.’
⁵⁴
The ‘trimming’ was substantial; the play ran for just under one hour and fifteen minutes. No one missed those sections of what was widely acknowledged to be a play of mixed inspiration – and indeed, authorship.
It is interesting to note exactly how Welles cut and rearranged the play, a much more thorough reworking than the modest revisions of
Macbeth
.

Taking the old play by the scruff of its neck, he fashioned it without inhibition to his own purposes. Its critical reputation, as a play, has never been high; it lacks unity of theme or tone. In the etymologically pedantic sense, it is a satire (satura,
a medley). Veering from the sublime (some of the most sublime utterances in all of English dramatic literature) to the childishly prankish, it combines morality play with Renaissance tragic-heroic drama, and was the work of many hands, including Rowley and Bird, incorporating passages from contemporary works, both prose and verse, while the clown John Adams wrote his own jokes. Welles became,
in effect, a posthumous collaborator. Not that he wrote any text – he never, in any of his adaptations, did that – but by omission and substitution, created a new play. The nub of this approach is that he didn’t interpret the text: he used it. His intention was direct effectiveness, abandonment of obscurity, and vivid juxtaposition of events. There was no political point to this (indeed, a handful
of militants had cancelled their seats because the show lacked ‘a social slant’, prompting Hallie Flanagan to write to her husband: ‘I suppose
they wanted Lenin’s blood streaming from the firmament’).
⁵⁵
Nor was there an intellectual, much less a philosophical, purpose. Immediacy was the only aim.

After the prologue, with its Icarus image, Welles plunges straight in with Faustus’s first line:
‘Che sarà, sarà! What will be shall be!’ thus cutting Faustus’s restless consideration of the intellectual disciplines, and particularly of divinity (in which he detects an absolute fatalism). With this cut, Welles excises the man’s essential character and dilemma, reducing him – or enlarging him, as you will – from a questing intellectual to Everyman. The opening speech, recklessly cut about,
makes little sense, completely transforming the original from its meaning, ‘metaphysics of magicians’ is so placed that it appears to refer to medicine, not to necromancy. The provocative phrase ‘Get a deity’ is rendered ‘gain a deity’. Substitution is rife, and it is not always clear why. Sometimes for euphony, sometimes perhaps to justify business. All this, of course, is perfectly Elizabethan practice;
the two editions of
Doctor Faustus
are clearly the result of two different productions, in which the actors have recorded their own improvements.

In Welles’s version, indisputably authentic Marlowe is hacked about just as much as any of the rest, partly due to an awareness of the limitations of the actors: the longer speeches are cut up and distributed among several voices; surprisingly, his
own longer speeches are also altered and cut, at the loss of some remarkably fine passages. He cuts ‘Now that the gloomy shadow of the earth, Longing to view Orion’s drizzling look, Leaps from th’Antarctic world unto the sky, And dims the welkin with her pitchy breath’ starting the speech ‘Faustus, begin thy incantations.’ He moves all the astonishing exchanges of Faustus and Mephostophilis in
their first interview (‘How comes it then that thou art out of hell?’ ‘Why this is hell, nor am I out of it’) to after the Seven Deadly Sins, and cuts ‘This word “damnation” terrifies not me’ – a sop to the Christian faction in the audience. From the soliloquy in scene five, astonishingly, he cuts

Away with such vain fancies and despair

Despair in God and trust in Beelzebub!

and also

The god thou serv’st is thine own appetite

Wherein is fixed the love of Beelzebub!

To him I’ll build an altar and a church

And offer lukewarm blood of newborn babes!

Too strong, presumably, for New York 1937. There are innumerable small changes to suit the production. Faustus agrees to give his soul to Mephostophilis immediately.

MEPHOSTOPHILIS

Tell me, Faustus, shall
I have thy soul?

FAUSTUS

What says Lucifer thy lord?

MEPHOSTOPHILIS

That I shall wait on Faustus whilst he lives

So he will buy my services with his sold.

FAUSTUS

Ay Mephostophilis, I give it thee

which is undeniably exciting and moves things along, but loses out on Faustus’s insatiable curiosity, his maggoty intellect, and the haunting lines (admittedly in Latin)
about the miserable denizens of hell loving company, so sardonically witty and bleak. Of course, Welles was tailoring the part to his actor. He cuts the spirits’ dance – rather crucial, one might have thought, to his dalliance with the spirits, culminating in Helen’s appearance. Inexplicably he changes the location of the place – Wittenberg, with its Hamletian associations – to Wertenberg (perhaps
he was harking back to
Jew Süss
, in which he played the Duke of that principality). He cuts the long interview with Mephostophilis about the cosmos, including

MEPHOSTOPHILIS

Where we are is hell

And where hell is, must we ever be

FAUSTUS

Come, I think hell’s a fable

and Lucifer’s intervention, going straight to the comic scene with Robin (Chubby Sherman) to which he adds
the scene with the Vintner, then plunges straight into the Seven Deadly Sins, each of whom is allowed only a line or two. After Lechery, Mephostophilis says, ‘Tell me, Faustus, how dost thou like thy wife?’ The audacity is breathtaking – is it brilliant? or cheap? – then, somewhat jarringly, has the conversation about Lucifer and hell – ‘What is that Lucifer thy lord?’ – from Faustus’s first encounter
with him. He cuts Lucifer’s
stupendous reappearance (‘Christ cannot save thy soul for he is just’) including his grim parting line – ‘Think of the devil and nothing else’ – and therefore the invitation to his infernal cabaret, the Seven Deadly Sins. The effect of this is also to lose the crucial theme of Faustus’s weakness for sensual diversions, something in which one might have expected Welles
of all people to be interested. The Emperor, and the Duke, and the horse-courser are all cut, mercifully, and the scene of Faustus’s final night on earth is slightly trimmed; only Pythagoras’ metem-psychosis is cut from the final aria, neither Pythagoras nor the migration of his soul being part of the intellectual baggage of the average twentieth-century play-goer. The argument about substitution
or omission of obscure phrases has been neither won nor lost; but we always lose something. Every generation of theatre-goers has had to learn the meaning of Macbeth’s ‘incarnadine’ and been the richer for it. As far as Welles was concerned, there was no argument: it was all academic humbug. The play was for the theatre; if the play-goer didn’t understand what was said there and then, everyone
had wasted their time.

All this is now very familiar practice. No Fringe or off-off Broadway company would think twice about merging characters, redistributing speeches, intercutting scenes. Even in 1937, it caused little stir. The assumption was that Welles had simply cut the boring bits. Far from it; he’s ruthlessly got rid of the gold and embellished the dross for reasons of pressing theatrical
need. The celestial drama – the fight for Faust’s soul – is much less urgent and chilling in Welles’s version and Faust’s own mercurial nature, with its violent mood swings, is made much more stable and dogged – as suits a rhetorical actor. (A typical cut is ‘What walking, disputing, etc … But leaving off this, let me have a wife, the fairest maid in Germany, for I am wanton and lascivious,
and cannot live without a wife’.) As so often, Welles’s approach harks back to an earlier precedent, and forward to something more modern. Welles’s way with
Doctor Faustus
recalls Henry Irving’s version of the same story, based on the Goethe play (but only just). Irving too used the existing text for his own purposes: to generate atmosphere and theatrical thrills in a series of set-pieces, and
to provide a framework for his own unique gifts (he of course played Mephostophilis).

Welles’s version is in the great tradition of actor-managerial theatre, the play used as a vehicle for the leading actor’s particular talents. But equally it is clear what his version is, in all its essentials: a screenplay, complete with intercutting, lightning transitions, dissolves, wipes and, in the use
of the apron stage, an equivalent to
the close-up. It succeeded triumphantly. Despite various sententious utterances, Welles was no theorist: he was a pragmatic operator, and
Doctor Faustus
worked, in exactly the way he wanted it to. Nothing that he subsequently did in the theatre – not even the famous
Julius Caesar
of the following year – was more completely achieved. The success was not necessarily
in terms of the acting (which was, said Brooks Atkinson, ‘not sublime’) but in its total effect. For Paula Laurence ‘
Doctor Faustus
is the definitive Orson Welles theatrical production – it embodied all the things that were special to him: the sense of mystery, the sense of magic, and the majesty of his own gift as an actor … he played Faustus in a baroque style that illuminated the text.’
⁵⁶
Even
Mary McCarthy, who had no intention of letting Welles get away with anything, acknowledged that ‘
Doctor Faustus
was truly successful, for here the formula actually corresponded in a way to the spirit and construction of the original, and one saw a play that was modern and, at the same time,
Doctor Faustus
.’
⁵⁷

The new 85c-a-head audience that the Federal Theatre Project had brought into the
theatre was agog. Welles himself said that ‘the audience was fresh. It was not the Broadway crowd … even less was it the special audience one has learned to associate with classic revivals. One had the feeling every night that people were on a voyage of discovery in the theatre.’
⁵⁸
Paula Laurence noted that ‘
Faustus
played to just people, you know – they were not intellectually prepared for the
arguments. Orson knew how to grab them in the best ways.’
⁵⁹
Stark Young wrote that ‘the audience’s attention was such that I have not seen elsewhere in the theatre this year.’ In the
WPA Audience Survey Report
for
Doctor Faustus
, in March 1937, the
OCCUPATIONAL CLASSIFICATIONS
are instructive:
PROFESSIONALS
account for 284, including 134 teachers, 27 lawyers, 1 weatherman, 1 X-ray technician,
1 aviator;
THE ARTS
for 117 including 45 writers, 1 dancer, 1 puppeteer,
TRADES
for 45 including 5 domestics, 1 lifeguard, 1 milkman,
BUSINESS
for 63. There were 153
OFFICE WORKERS,
and 192
MISCELLANEOUS
including 134 students, 1 shopper, 1 travel agent.

The reaction to the play was overwhelmingly affirmative: 940 people admired it; 143 preferred not to comment and only twenty were negative
about it. It is clear that the Federal Theatre Project had tapped a new, responsive, eager audience. Small wonder that Paula Laurence and her fellow actors felt that ‘we should have had a national theatre and Orson Welles should have been the head of it’.
⁶⁰
This was a notion frequently mooted, in one form or another, during the next couple of years. The idea was beginning to be formed that
Orson
Welles was going to be the saviour of the American theatre. His failure to fulfil that expectation was a hard blow for many people.

Welles himself had no intention of forming any national theatre, which is, to put it mildly, a full-time job, allowing of few extra-curricular activities. With the success of
Faustus
, his appetite for work, any work, seemed redoubled. Not only did the run of the
play fail to hinder his ever-increasing involvement with radio, the performance itself wasn’t allowed to interfere with it. Barely pausing in his headlong rush from one studio to another, Welles arrived at the theatre as Chorus was starting to speak the opening lines of the play, during which he would throw his costume on, arriving on stage just in time for ‘Che sarà, sarà!’ There was another radio
show to do at 8.30 p.m., so as soon as his first scene with Mephostophilis was over he would climb – in costume and substantial make-up – into an ambulance specially hired for the occasion and speed through the streets of New York, bells ringing, to the studio, for twenty minutes giving his all to the radio audience, thereupon returning to the theatre, to watch Christ’s blood stream through the
firmament. Clearly Welles was of the ‘just get up and do it’ school of actors. Any notion that some preparation might be useful for what is, though not the longest, by no means the least demanding of roles in the classical repertory, was alien to him.